


open up the door, let the light in

by intrikate88



Category: Mr. Right
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Female Friendship, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: When Martha and Francis go back to the apartment to make sure Sophie isn't locked in the closet, Martha has a heart-to-heart with her best friend about growing into who she truly is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [formerlydf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/gifts).



She and Francis are what normal people call crazy, Martha was aware. She had spent some of her life being crazy as a hobby— a few therapists, some prescriptions, various words prefacing the phrase “personality disorder” as if something deeper than brain chemicals were wrong with her and it was actually her, Martha, who was made wrong. It was hurtful, to be quite honest, especially when her parents agreed. She knew when things happened that would upset other people, she sometimes didn’t cry. Sometimes she hid, or couldn’t stop laughing, or just kind of stopped being there, in her head. For a while, she cared. For about six years in high school and college, she stayed quiet, and she watched other people, and sometimes she told them dumb things about seeing their dad on the news right then because he’d been killed in a hit and run and, when they believed her, cataloguing their reactions for later. And it worked, mostly. By the end of high school, she had friends, or at least people who didn’t mind her because they were high and thought she was funny. 

 

College was a little harder, since she didn’t know what direction she wanted to go, and everybody was making friends with people who shared their interests. She liked animals, even if they never really seemed to like her much. She joined the small group that fed the forty or so feral cats on campus, and helped with the apiary project maintaining beehives on the library roof. Her first roommate was a failure; Martha hadn’t really thought it out when she commandeered Hyunju’s closet as her quiet place, but it wasn’t like Martha was the inconsiderate one in the dorm when Hyunju brought a guy back to their shared room without even checking if Martha was there, and the mess the guy made when Martha jumped out of the closet was definitely not considerate. Her second roommate, though, was Sophie. 

 

Sophie was _good_. Sophie was who everyone came to with a broken heart, and she spent more nights than not rubbing the backs of drunk girls puking into her toilet. Sophie thought meditation was healthy and tried to do it with Martha, and together they put twinkly string lights in Martha’s closet. When a guy tried to tell Martha she didn’t mean it when she said she very much did not want to have sex with him, Sophie harangued the guy in their kitchen for forty minutes about consent and wouldn’t let him leave until he had not only apologized, but also answered enough of Sophie’s questions acceptably that she conceded he might have learned why he should never do that. Sophie was so good that Martha wanted to help her too, even if all she could think of most days was making her cereal for breakfast. (Eggs burned too easily.) Martha wished her mom could have been like Sophie, instead of being worried and prying and busy. When she told that to Sophie, they’d hugged, and Sophie had said she wished her mom could have been like Martha, happy and not drunk with whatever boyfriend she had that week. 

 

And after a few years together, and graduating, and not getting jobs, Sophie decided to go to grad school at the University of New Orleans and for lack of a better plan, Martha went with her. Because they were roommates and Sophie hadn’t said she couldn’t. Which Martha knew made her sound like kind of a psycho stalker of a best friend, but it wasn’t like that, because Sophie told everyone what she thought of them. Often whether they wanted her to or not, but Martha knew she needed someone who wouldn’t just brush her off as a weirdo— and she could be a weirdo, with Sophie, when it was too much effort to act like a sexy normal girlfriend or a grown woman who didn’t overthink her t-shirts or maybe didn’t wear t-shirts at all, and Sophie would tell her if she was getting, like, Darwin Award—level weirdo. 

 

The point of all of this was: once Martha was discharged from the hospital (with thirty-six stitches in various places, two dislocated finger joints relocated, and an icepack for her left eye where she’d gotten slapped), and then had broken her boyfriend out without him being discharged (because doctors don’t let you go when you have six broken ribs wrapped up, eighty stitches, a possible detached retina, a thoroughly bandaged hand, and several pieces of buckshot picked out of your face), she said, “Let’s go home and let Sophie out of the closet.”

 

“She seems smart or at least persistent, she probably managed to get out,” Francis responded, slinging an arm around her shoulders. 

 

Martha reached up and laced her fingers through his. “No, baby, she would have called me by now, I went and got my phone back after I bashed Johnny Moon’s face in and there weren’t any missed calls. She only thinks you’re a dangerous psycho because she cares about me.”

 

“Which is totally unfair! I’ve never been anything but polite to her, even when I said I’d shoot her, but she knows I didn’t mean it.”

 

“I know! You’re _my_ dangerous psycho, so it’s okay. But she might have not caught all that, because of the not-FBI dude. I want to go home and sleep anyway.”

 

“Wait, you don’t have a concussion, do you, monster?” Francis started feeling around her head. She pushed his hand away and laughed. 

 

“I’m good! They thought some of it was down to shock. But I didn’t feel in shock, I felt…” She let out a little whoop. “Like I can do anything, you know? I never could decide what I wanted to do, or even if I could, people just— they didn’t take it seriously? And god! We could go anywhere!” 

 

Francis twirled her around to face him and kissed her, some of his stitches tickling her cheek. “Anywhere,” he promised. “Like, right now, we could go to Argentina right now.” 

 

“No, tomorrow, we’re checking on Sophie first.” She yawned. “And taking a long nap.”  

 

The bodies were gone from the poolside when they got back to the apartment, but the blood was still there. “Hopper must have called a cleaner to come in while he was on his way to us,” Francis commented. “He’s never cleaned up his messes very well, but you gotta admire the man for trying.” 

 

“I’m sure the maintenance staff appreciates it,” Martha agreed. 

 

Sophie, when they got in the door, was still in the closet. She was much less patient than she had been hours before, which was not much to start with. “Did you _realize_ that closet doesn’t have a handle on the inside? And it doesn’t have a standard latch that I could slide something in the crack. So I sat there, without my phone, while _you ran off with an insane murderer to get killed!”_   By the end of this, Sophie’s voice was coming out at a level that Martha’s not-concussed head still found painful. 

 

“I’m _sorry_ , Sophie, you absolutely don’t deserve any of this and I know how it looks—“

 

“Do you? _Do you, Martha?_  This isn’t like when you got in the ice cream man’s truck, this guy is actually a killer and if that guy wasn’t with the FBI, then that means even MORE killers are showing up—“ 

 

“No, no, we took care of that, nobody else is showing up,” Francis said in what passed for a reasonable tone while Martha simultaneously said, “There were more of them, but they’re all dead now, I killed two of them—“

 

“ _YOU DID WHAT?”_  


“Okay, okay, Sophie, I think we all need to just take a moment, do some breathing exercises except for me because I have six broken ribs, and appreciate the wonder of being alive,” Francis said, in what would have been a soothing tone under other circumstances. 

 

“You don’t get to talk!” Sophie stuck a finger in his face. “Francis, you go sit.”

 

Francis sulked, but wandered towards the couch muttering that he wanted to kill Hopper again for sharing his name with the _entire fucking world, apparently_. 

 

“Sophie—“

 

“Martha! Are you fucking kidding me? Look, I know you’re wired a little differently from most people, you know that anything I tell you is wrong with you isn’t because of that, but _did you really kill people and then show up at home like a perky psychotic sorority girl_?” 

 

Martha dropped her jaw. It wasn’t that Sophie’s reaction to her killing Johnny Moon and that other short asshole was unreasonable; after all, Martha herself had walked out of Francis’s life just days before when she’d seen him kill a man. But that wasn’t what stung. “Sophie, they had kidnapped me. See how totally waxed my upper lip looks? They duct taped my mouth shut, like, three times. They were going to kill us!” Martha searched Sophie’s eyes, looking for any sign that her friend, who had always protected her and thought the best of her, even when nobody else thought she was worth it. “He came to get me even though he knew it was a trap, he got the shit beaten out of him, and so I girled the hell up and you know what? I stopped them. I told them to let me go or I’d kill them, and they laughed at me and hit me, and I killed them.” She took a breath and pushed her hair back from her face. “Sophie, please, I know how you’ve been seeing every red flag in sight since you pulled me and my wine bottle out of my closet. I know what all this has looked like. But I need you— I need you to tell me you understand that— that this wasn’t me being impulsive. Well, okay, it was. But that I had…”

 

“… a reason,” Sophie finished. “Motivation.”

 

“Yes!” Martha lit up. “Motivation!”

 

“YOU COULD HAVE DIED. YOU COULD HAVE GONE TO PRISON,” Sophie shouted. 

 

“Should I make some chamomile tea for all of us?” Francis volunteered from the couch. 

 

“Shut the fuck up,” Sophie ordered in his direction. “Martha, I’ve been terrified, I’ve been mad, I’ve been needing to pee for three hours. I’ve been picturing coming home to your dead body for a week. But every time in the last six years that anyone has talked shit about you, voting you most likely to paint a wall mural with all your neighbors’ blood—“

 

“It’d dry too fast,” interrupted Martha, scoffing and barely restraining herself from rolling her eyes.

 

“—I have stuck up for you and told them how wrong they are. And I need to know. Was I wrong to believe that about you?”

 

This wasn’t what Martha had expected. Sophie’s anger at boyfriends, yes, that was not unusual. She’d kicked out her own boyfriends and plenty of other people’s before. Because she was protective, and she looked out for other people, and while she might think Martha was crazy, she’d never thought she was truly broken. “You’re not wrong. You’re not,” Martha said. “I’m happy. I’m happy because I found out that my reflexes aren’t useless, I’m happy because I wasn’t helpless, I’m happy because a guy who likes crushing little baby turtles to death is not going to kill anyone else because I hit him until he was dead. It’s not about being me being some empty shell of a person who goes and kills people for fun.” She reached out to squeeze Sophie’s arm. “It’s like I’ve shut myself in a quiet little closet all my life and I don’t have to anymore.”

 

Sophie searched her face. “You’re really going to make a coming out of the closet metaphor. For this. Right now.”

 

Martha winced. “Okay, that wasn’t great.”

 

“No, but I’ve pulled you out of your closet enough to know what it means to walk out yourself.” Sophie tried to smile. “And if him getting you involved in all this gets you hurt instead of finding yourself, I’ll kill him.” 

 

“You definitely should,” said Francis from the kitchen, a banana in his mouth as he filled a ziplock with all the ice from their freezer. “Martha’s amazing, she needs more than one person who can kill a guy competently for love. Not that she can’t take care of that herself, but you know what I mean.” He came back to where they were standing, holding a gallon-sized bag of ice to his ribs. “By the way, I wasn’t serious about shooting you earlier. I’m really sorry about that, I’m trying to be better about killing people and taking it all too lightly is a part of that, and I just really wanted to apologize.”

 

Sophie ignored him. “Martha, you’re— you’re you. And that’s okay. Just as long as you’re still you, that’s what I care about.” She looked over at Francis. “You, though, you’re a fucking nutjob. And I’m not kidding when I say I’ll punch your broken ribs if you annoy me.” She looked both of them up and down. “Okay, you both look like shit. Go to bed. I’ll be here when you get up.”

 

Martha beamed. Francis tossed a second bag of ice from behind her, which made Sophie duck, and Martha caught it without looking. 

 

“And we’re going to have to set some rules about throwing things and weapons in the house,” Sophie added, and sighed. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so glad to have gotten this fic assignment, because hitman romcoms are definitely one of my fave genres, and this movie doesn't get enough love. You had so many good things in your letter, and I hope that I was able to capture at least some of what you wanted. The merriest of Yuletides to you, friend.


End file.
